Chapter 1613:


    A crease formed between Maia’s brows. Carefully, she used one hand to lift his eyelid while angling the shlight beam directly into his pupil. Under the harsh light, the pupil shrank slightly, the reaction slow and dulled.


    That minimal contraction confirmed one thing — his brainstem had not shut downpletely.


    Yet there was no meaningful response. Not to her voice, not to the intrusive light. No resistance, no instinctive withdrawal, not even the faintest attempt to blink. That level of unresponsiveness was deeply abnormal. Even someone under heavy anesthesia would retain some reflexive tension. He did not. Hey there with the vacant passivity of an object, not a living man.


    Maia pressed hard into the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, then shifted her fingers to the sensitive groove beneath his nose. His face remained smooth. No twitch disturbed his features. Every muscle had surrendered to unnatural ckness, and the sight filled her with quiet dread.


    It was as if the connection between his mind and body had been severed entirely. Nothing directed him anymore. Nothing responded. Only his vital functions continued, sustaining him without awareness.


    A cold realization began assembling itself in her thoughts.


    Her attention moved upward, settling on the crown of his head. The wig resting there appeared slightly misaligned, its cement imperfect. Along the hairline, a thin seam of adhesive caught the beam of her shlight.


    Her eyes sharpened.


    She reached forward, grasped the artificial hair, and tested it with a cautious pull.


    It lifted away with ease.


    Her pupils constricted sharply. A quiet breath escaped through her parted lips.


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    Beneath the unforgiving re of the shlight, Kolton’s head waspletely bare, his scalp stripped clean. And there, stark against the pale bluish surface of his skin, rested a square bandage soaked dark with blood. At its edges, fresh crimson continued to seep outward, slow and unmistakable.


    A wound inflicted not long ago. Recent, deliberate, and executed with surgical exactness. The clean geometry of a craniotomy cut.


    “Animals.” The word slipped from Maia’s lips in a low whisper, her fingers growing colder the longer she stared. “What did they do to you?”


    With controlled care, she lifted the edge of the bandage. Beneath it, a precise surgical line appeared, closed with meticulous sutures directly over the prefrontal region.


    Even without instruments or scans, Maia recognized it immediately. Her training left no room for doubt.


    A prefrontal lobotomy. The procedure infamous for stripping a person of themselves.


    Fragments of medical history surfaced unbidden in her thoughts, drawn from its most unforgiving pages. Once presented as a treatment for mental illness, it had never truly healed anything — it had only destroyed what made a person whole. The operation severed the pathways linking the prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain, and afterward, patients lost their resistance, their emotional depth, their memory. Even their sense of self dissolved into emptiness.


    This had never been medicine.


    This was turning a person into a walking corpse — a body left breathing, sustained by biology alone, while the person inside ceased to exist.


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